The Old Fashioned Garden

Old Fashion Gardening.

  • Topic: Garden Design
  • Keywords: history, old fashion, gardening, perennials, Other, gardens
  • Date: February 2004

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I never knew my great grandmother, but grew up hearing stories about her. I loved her wildness (two illegitimate children, one divorce that she instigated in 1883!), and I was always pleased we shared a name, Cynthia Anne.

Word was she hated being in the house, preferring the garden instead. We have a lot in common there, but it’s also where we part. Her garden in Galesburg, Illinois (read, fertile soil) was so spectacular, so I was told, that she conducted formal garden tours.

You will not find that happening at my place. But it doesn’t keep me from trying to capture the flavor that I envision her garden had.

There is something nostalgic and wistful about gardens of the long-ago past. They evoke tranquility and embody a time when there simply was more time. Today, the old fashioned garden can almost be tacked down to a certain time period. The book “Grandmother’s Garden” by Mary Brawley Hull (Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995) uses a subtitle, The Old-Fashioned American Garden 1865 and 1915.

It’s during this era when seed companies, nurseries, garden manuals and magazines were originating. Also hundreds of new plants from around the world were being discovered, and their introduction to cultivation began a fervor.

When the English landscapist, John Claudius, advocated irregular groupings of flowers and shrubs, it caused a stir of excitement in America. Then American garden designer Andrew Downing endorsed curving paths instead of straight walkways. Already there had been a distinction, if not a real separation, from the kitchen garden and the pleasure garden.

Two notable women gardeners were Emily Dickenson 1830-1886) and Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896). Both reported being among plants served as a respite from work; and for Stowe, selling her vegetables also helped support her large family.

Following the Civil War, many of the garden writers were women who produced a flood of articles suggesting that women get into gardens, not only for pleasure but for exercise as well as business opportunities. One of the ideas generated was turning the garden into the outside parlor.

And the plant list of this era only begins with:

holly hocks, sweet peas, phloxes, gladiolus, larkspurs, sunflowers, lilies honeysuckle, rue, lavender, mint, marigolds, gilly flowers, carnations, myrtle, roses

Raised beds or boxed in plank beds became popular, and the preferred style of garden was the “mingled bloom.” And this, at least for me, truly conjures up that wistfulness for the old fashioned garden—a well established small plot of land with a long and profuse flowering season, everything overlapping and falling into one another.

And so the story goes: when my great grandmother’s daughter (my grandmother) was just barely old enough, she was told to bake all the bread, cook and clean. This way Cynthia Anne could join the throngs of women of her time and get out of the house and do some serious gardening.

Another resource book is “Grandma’s Garden” by Laura Martin (Longstreet Press, 1990).